Fiskars Pruning Stik®

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Before I tell you about the Fiskars Pruning Stik®, a little about me and tools. I’m not really a tool guy. I’ve got a hammer and pliers and some wrenches and stuff but you’ll not find me trying to fix the washing machine or changing the oil in my truck. But I have a fondness for outdoor power tools.

I’ve had a couple of chainsaws, a weed trimmer and last year I added a pole saw (all Stihl products). I can’t explain it but I enjoy going down into our woods and clearing brush and cutting cedar trees. Not sure how many more years I’ll be able to (safely) do this but for now, it’s something I enjoy.

The Stihl pole saw allows me to trim limbs that you couldn’t get to with the big chainsaw. But it weighs about 15 pounds and gets heavy fast. And we kept seeing dead limbs that were just out of reach of the pole saw.

Barb started researching “extendable tree pruners” and purchased the Pruning Stik® from Fiskars. I think it was about a hundred bucks quickly proved it’s worth. Extends to twelve feet and light enough you can safely stand on a ladder for a few extra feet. We’ve been going nuts with the thing. You wouldn’t think you could exert enough force (at the end of a long pole) to cut a good size limb, but it works like a charm.
I’ll still fire up the pole saw for the bigger jobs but the Pruning Stik is a must-have tool if you have a lot of trees.

Fake Deaths

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I’ve been telling myself the pandemic would become real to people in the U.S. once X number of deaths were recorded. When the number is too high to be ignored. I’m wrong about that. The number doesn’t matter if you don’t believe it. These are “fake deaths” in the minds of a whole bunch of people. Covid won’t be “real” until everyone knows someone (family or friend) brought down (death or serious illness) by the virus. If that doesn’t do it, I’m out of ideas.

Giving up on time

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“He was used to the disappearance of large parts of his life. Sometimes, he passed out at ten o’clock in the morning, and when he woke up, it was nine o’clock in the morning — some other morning. At first, the time changes were disorienting, but over the course of a couple of years, he got used to it. He simply gave up on time — now life was daytime and nighttime, strung along like beads on a string, and the minute, hour, and date were irrelevant.”

— Wicked Prey (John Sandford)

Time to grow up

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“We live infinitesmally short lifespans on an insignificant speck of dust in space, with delusions of grandeur, when the best we can achieve, which is pretty good, is friendship, love and to a small extent, self-awareness. We’re going to get smart now, and learn to be the humble mortals that we are. Or we’re going to cease to exist. In other words, it’s time for the human race to grow up.”

— Dave Winer

Raccoons-1, Humans-0

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My friend George kept his cat food in a metal cabinet to keep it from the raccoons. The figured out how to work the latch and open the doors. So he started locking the doors. They found the key (hanging on a hook nearby) and stole it. He had to break the latch to open the doors. Problem solved.

6,200 thoughts per day

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“A new study from psychologists at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario Canada reports observations of the transition from one thought to another in fMRI brain scans. Though the researchers don’t detect the content of our thoughts, their method allows them to count each one, and they say we have about 6,200 thoughts per day. The researchers refer to them as “thought worms.”

“We had our breakthrough by giving up on trying to understand what a person is thinking about, and instead focusing on when they have moved on. Our methods help us detect when a person is thinking something new, without regard to what the new thought is.”